Shut down question

My PC is a Vista Home Premium 32 bit with Vista SP2
I have a general question about hard shutdown of system.
Once in awhile when I select restart of my PC, it will show going into “shutdown” but then seems to be stuck. Screen will show shutting down message and the little spinning circle. But it just keeps spinning.
So because my lack of patience I then hold down the power button on the CPU tower until it shuts off( shut off then happens in a few seconds )
I know this is not good to do, but the machine is not shutting down. I gave read that really bad things can happen with this action.
I do know when I have done this before , the machine will start up without problems no BSOD, system seems to load without problem
But like I said I read bad things resulting.
Can I consider my self lucky thus dar that the system re-starts without problems? Or are there hidden problems I’m not seeing?
Example this happened the other day after I ran that clean up function on vista ( where it deletes temp file, items in the trash bin , etc). After running the function, I went to restart, and it hung on shut down. Then after a minute or two u held the power button down and the PC shut off . Then after a minute or so I turned the power button on and it started up without any visible issues. On subsequent restarts ( like much later in the day or line the next day after updating adobe reader) it would shut down as normal and restart as normal.
Like I say am u just lucky there is no problem?

Calls,

So far so good. You've been very lucky. When all of the background activities have completed just before I click on shut down the computer is black in a very few minutes. If there are activities which cannot/do not/ will not abort and have not completed then it can be a few, as long as five, minutes before the machine is black.

Try to be a bit more patient and let the machine do its thing at its speed.

As alwyas, stay well and surf safe

Hi Calls I had the same thing with windows vista sp2 32bit with the shut down and I would do the same thing with the reset /start button on my computer and it would restart to a screen witch would ask if you would like to start with the last good configuration and push any key to continue and the computer would continue to the sign in screen . I have updated that computer to windows 8 pro 32 bit and have not had that forced shut down happen since. BTW I do use classic shell on that computer to boot to the desktop screen to avoid the new start menu witch I do not like. With windows 8 on that computer does boot a lot faster than when I had vista on it

Thanks all
@ ALF60
In my case after the hard shutdown, when I would restart the PC it would just restart as normal without any issue

Now the last time it hung on shutdown, I had just used that function in Vista where it will delete temp files, temp Internet files and trash. So maybe I tried to restart too soon after running that process.
Now since then I have rebooted a few times without any hang on shutdown